The momentum for putting a price on carbon to help keep the Earth cool has gathered surprising speed ahead of the next round of UN climate negotiations that opened in Lima.

“I think we are coming into the event with a head of steam that many of us weren’t really expecting,” said Dirk Forrister, president of the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), in a briefing to reporters last week.

Supporters of carbon pricing say it will force companies to lower their use of carbon-emitting fossil fuels, increase efficiency and propel the use of alternative energy.

Carbon pricing got a big boost in September at the special UN climate leadership summit in New York, when 74 countries, 23 states and provinces and more than 1,000 businesses and investors backed a global initiative to assign a cost to fossil fuel emissions blamed for global warming.

“The science is clear,” said Rachel Kyte, the World Bank’s top climate envoy, in a September statement. “The economics are compelling. We are seeing a shift toward the economic architecture that will be necessary to avoid a 2-degree-warmer world.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Chage (IPCC) projects ever-rising sea levels, increasingly disastrous weather patterns and loss of human lives by the century’s end unless the temperature increase can be held to 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial times. At the current rate, Earth is on course for a 3-to-4 degree rise, some experts say.

Aside from carbon pricing, other topics to be discussed in Lima include re-forestation to absorb more carbon dioxide (C02) and financial support to help the worst-affected countries adapt to climate change.

By March 2015, each of more than 190 countries is to submit reduction goals to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). By December 2015, final negotiations in Paris are slated to seal a new agreement to replace the moribund Kyoto Protocol.

About 40 countries and more than 20 cities, states and provinces already have a carbon pricing policy or a plan to launch one.

China has seven pilot projects and plans by 2016 to set up a national carbon trading system - an “absolute game changer” as the world’s largest CO2 emitter, said IETA’s Jeff Swartz.

Quebec and California have formed one carbon market systems. Mexico now taxes carbon, and investors can trade in carbon credits on the country’s stock market. The European Union has the oldest and largest carbon trading system.

Businesses have been pushing for carbon pricing for years, and many have started tracking their own emissions.

In the US, the world’s second largest carbon emitter, centre-right Republicans are threatening to roll back President Barack Obama’s executive climate actions once they control both houses of Congress in January.

Companies like Nokia, Norway’s Statoil ASA and Royal Dutch Shell want to see carbon pricing sooner rather than later, so they can plan ahead.

In the next round of climate negotiations, academics and corporate officials are looking for an open-ended approach that will allow emerging carbon markets to link to each other across borders.

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